Khosrow-Nāma*

An Unexpected Romance: Reevaluating the Authorship of the Khosrow-nāma* AUSTIN O’MALLEY The University of Arizona ([email protected]) Abstract This article examines the authorship of the Khosrow-nāma, a Perso-Hellenic romance traditionally attributed to ʿAṭṭār. Forty years ago, Shafiʿi-Kadkani laid out a complex argument against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship. He claimed that the attribution was a result of a later forgery, basing his argument on internal chronological evidence, religious and stylistic markers, and the manuscript tradition. The present article systematically evaluates this argument, showing it to be less persuasive than it first appears. First, I introduce new manuscript evidence to demonstrate that the poem was circulating under ʿAṭṭār’s name already before the time of the alleged forgery. I then reassess the internal evidence to show that the Khosrow-nāma could, in fact, fit into a plausible chronology of ʿAṭṭār’s oeuvre. Next, I critique the stylistic and religious arguments against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship, arguing that the romance does not deviate from ʿAṭṭār’s undisputed works nearly as much as is often supposed. I conclude by suggesting that the available data are explained more easily by accepting ʿAṭṭār’s authorship than by adopting the theory of a later forgery. ew poets have had as far-reaching an influence as Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār (d. ca. 618/1221). The author of the famous Manṭeq al-ṭayr and several other important works, he is remembered both within the tradition and outside it as a critical figure in the devel- Fopment of Persian mystical poetry.1 As is the case with many premodern Persian poets, as * Although this paper generally follows the transliteration guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, vowels are transliterated according to the system of Encyclopaedia Iranica, which is phonetically more accurate for Persian: short vowels appear as “a,” “e,” and “o,” and long ones as “ā,” “i,” and “u.” I would like to thank Cameron Cross, Alexandra Hoffmann, Alexander Jabbari, Franklin Lewis, and Matthew Miller for their comments and suggestions in the preparation of this paper. 1. Moḥammad Reżā Shafiʿi-Kadkani, introduction to Manṭeq al-ṭayr, by Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Sokhan, 1387/[2008–9]), 38–50; Julian Baldick, “Persian Ṣūfī Poetry up to the Fifteenth Century,” in History of Persian Literature: From the Beginning of the Islamic Period to the Present Day, ed. George Morrison (Leiden: Brill, 1981); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Some Observations on the Place of ʿAṭṭār within the Sufi Tradition,” in Colloquio italo-iraniano sul poeta mistico Fariduddin ʿAṭṭār (Roma, 24–25 Marzo 1977) (Rome: Accademia Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 201-232 202 • AUSTIN O’MALLEY his fame grew spurious works began to circulate under his name. With ʿAṭṭār, however, the number of spurious attributions is staggering: by the eleventh/seventeenth century, he was said to have composed a total of 114 works, equal to the number of suras in the Quran.2 Given the sacral significance of the number, it cannot be taken as an accurate count of all attributions, but it testifies to the scale of his supposed output. According to ʿAli Miranṣāri, who has produced a bibliographical survey of ʿAṭṭār’s works, at least fifty-nine independent titles, many of them still extant, have at some point been attributed to him.3 Some of these works were composed by other poets who went by the name of ʿAṭṭār, and their poems were inadvertently absorbed into the oeuvre of their more famous predecessor.4 Others, however, were deliberate forgeries: the Lesān al-ghayb and the Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾeb, for instance, were written by a ninth/fifteenth-century Shiʿi poet, ʿAṭṭār-e Tuni, who purposefully presented himself as Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār, the author of the Manṭeq al-ṭayr.5 In the twentieth century, with the advancement of textual criticism, scholars such as Qazvini, Sherani, Nafisi, and Ritter began to methodically whittle away at these spurious accretions to ʿAṭṭār’s oeuvre.6 Through their work, a stable scholarly consensus emerged: ʿAṭṭār was thought to have written four mystical-didactic mas̱navis (the Elāhi-nāma, the Manṭeq al-ṭayr, the Asrār-nāma, and the Moṣibat-nāma), a divān, a collection of quatrains (the Mokhtār-nāma), and a prose hagiography (Taẕkerat al-awliā). These scholars also accepted as authentic a mas̱navi romance that was commonly attributed to ʿAṭṭār and known as the Khosrow-nāma. Unlike ʿAṭṭār’s mystical-didactic mas̱navis, which comprise short anecdotes and homiletic exhortations, the Khosrow-nāma recounts the story of two royal lovers, tragically separated, as they seek to reunite; it is thus reminiscent of Greek novels and Perso-Hellenic romances such as Varqa o Golshāh and Vis o Rāmin. The work is a clear generic outlier in ʿAṭṭār’s oeuvre; nevertheless, because ʿAṭṭār includes the title Khosrow-nāma in a list of his works, and because the author of the Khosrow-nāma identifies himself as ʿAṭṭār and as the author of the Manṭeq al-ṭayr, the abovementioned scholars accepted the poem as genuine. Nazionale dei Lincei, 1978), 12–13; Husayn Ilahi-Gomeshei, “Of Scent and Sweetness: ʿAṭṭār’s Legacy in Rūmī, Shabistarī, and Ḥāfiẓ,” inʿAṭṭār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (London: I. B. Tauris and Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2006). 2. Sayyed Nurallāh Shushtari, Majāles al-moʾmenin (Tehran: Ketāb-forushi-ye Eslāmiya, 1365/[1986–87]), 99. 3. ʿAli Miranṣāri, Ketāb-shenāsi-ye Shaykh Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār-e Nayshāburi (Tehran: Anjoman-e Ās̱ār va Mafākhar-e Farhangi, 1384/[2005–6]), 7–16. 4. Mirzā Moḥammad Qazvini, introduction to Taẕkerat al-awliā, by Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār, ed. Reynold Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1905), 1:14; Hellmut Ritter, “Philologika X: Farīdaddīn ʿAṭṭār,” Der Islam 25 (1939): 157. 5. ʿAbdu’l-Ḳādir Sarfarāz, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Urdu Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Bombay (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1935), 60–65; Saʿid Nafisi, Jostoju dar aḥvāl va ās̱ār-e Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār-e Nayshāburi (Tehran: Eqbāl, 1320/[1941]), 147–54; Hellmut Ritter, “Philologika XIV: Farīduddīn ʿAṭṭār II,” Oriens 11, no. 1/2 (1958): 3–4. 6. Qazvini, introduction to Taẕkerat al-awliā, 1:14; Sarfarāz, Descriptive Catalogue, 60–65; Nafisi, Jostoju, 70–73, 145–67; Hellmut Ritter, “ʿAṭṭār,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill Online), posted 2012, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0074; Ritter, “Philologika X,” 156–60; Ritter, “Philologika XIV,” 1–8. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019) An Unexpected Romance: Reevaluating the Authorship of the Khosrow-nāma • 203 In 1979, however, the poet and scholar Shafiʿi-Kadkani laid out an erudite, intricate argument claiming that the Khosrow-nāma was a spurious attribution and that its preface, in which the poem’s author identifies himself as ʿAṭṭār, was the work of a ninth/fifteenth- century forger.7 This influential argument is now almost universally accepted, and it has conditioned nearly all of the major work on ʿAṭṭār produced since its publication. Leonard Lewison and Christopher Shackle, in their edited volume on ʿAṭṭār, deem Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s rejection of the Khosrow-nāma definitive.8 Newer reference works and editions, including the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, repeat Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s conclusions.9 Of the two most recent monographs on ʿAṭṭār, by Navid Kermani and Claudia Yaghoobi, the former dismisses the Khosrow-nāma with a citation to Shafiʿi-Kadkani, and the latter fails to mention it at all.10 As far as the scholarship seems to be concerned, the case is closed: the Khosrow-nāma is spurious, and it has thus justly disappeared from the arena of ʿAṭṭār studies. Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s argument, however, although frequently cited as settled fact, has not been systematically evaluated.11 In the present article, I will problematize Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s analysis and propose a more plausible scenario, in which the Khosrow-nāma is indeed an authentic work by ʿAṭṭār. Although there can be no doubting Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s brilliance, his argument is, as a whole, less convincing than the sum of its parts: he seems to have begun with the assumption that the Khosrow-nāma was forged, and then worked backward to determine how that could have been the case. As we shall see, his conclusions are not justified by the stylistic, religious, manuscript, and internal chronological evidence he provides. Ultimately, it is much easier to accept the Khosrow-nāma as an authentic work of ʿAṭṭār’s than to imagine it was the product of a complex literary conspiracy, as Shafiʿi- Kadkani proposes. If the romance were to be accepted as an authentic work, much of the scholarship on ʿAṭṭār’s life and his place in literary history would need to rethought. One of the difficulties for ʿAṭṭār scholarship has been the dearth of biographical information, both within his 7. Moḥammad Reżā Shafiʿi-Kadkani, introduction to Mokhtār-nāma, by Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Sokhan, 1389/[2010–11]), 33–59. 8. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle, editors’ introduction to Lewisohn and Shackle, Spiritual Flight, xviii. See also Hermann Landolt, “ʿAṭṭār, Sufism, and Ismailism,” in Lewisohn and Shackle, Spiritual Flight, 3. 9. Moḥammad Esteʿlāmi, introduction to Taẕkerat al-awliā, by Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭār, rev. ed. (Tehran: Zavvār, 1383/[2004–5]), xxv; Miranṣāri, Ketāb-shenāsi, 75, 232; Omid Safi, “ʿAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill Online), posted 2016, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_ COM_23976. 10. Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 30; Claudia Yaghoobi, Subjectivity in ʿAṭṭār, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2017).

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